The common-property problem results in excessive mining, hunting, and extraction of oil and water. The same phenomenon is also responsible for excessive investment in R&D and excessive outlays in rent-seeking contests. We propose a "Partnership Solution" to eliminate or at least mitigate these...

"This paper introduces a management regime that would maintain common property rights by allowing resource users to harvest on their own but to share their extraction outcome with a given number of other resource users. The developed partnership approach makes use of the shirkingincentives in...

"We develop an evolutionary game theory model for a limited access common pool resource. With full disclosure of individual extraction decisions and payoffs we conjecture that subjects will imitate the most successful players’ strategy as long as their payoffs increase. We derive a stable...

We consider a health authority seeking to allocate annual budgets optimally over time to minimize the discounted social cost of infection(s) evolving in a finite set of R = 2 groups. This optimization problem is challenging, since as is well known, the standard epidemiological model describing...

In markets for many fruits, vegetables, and an increasing number of imported goods, consumers cannot discern the quality of a product prior to purchase and can never identify its producer. Producing high-quality, safe goods is costly for a firm and raises the collective reputation for quality...

We derive several comparative-static results for Cournot games when firms have nonconstant marginal-cost curves which shift exogenously. The results permit us to rank certain vectors of equilibrium marginal costs with the same component sum according to their associated social surplus or...

Throughout the developing world, many water distribution systems are unreliable. As a result, it becomes necessary for each household to store its own water as a hedge against this uncertainty. Since arrivals of water are not synchronized across households, serious distributional inefficiencies...

Book chapter without abstract

While reviewing "Game Theory and the Law" by Douglas Baird, Robert Gertner, and Randal Picker, this essay provides a self-contained, layman's introduction to modern noncooperative game theory

While reviewing "Game Theory and the Law" by Baird, Gertner and Picker, the essay provides a self-contained, nontechnical introduction to modern noncooperative game theory.